GROOVING A GROOVE

OK folks. A few more things about groove and then we’ll move on.

Earlier I talked about using the Groove Pool to quantize clips, but that’s only a piece of the quantization puzzle. A big reason that the Quantize setting exists is to apply pre-quantization. That means forcing a clip to conform to a strict grid before applying the groove’s timing variations.

So, why would you do this?

The reason is that you might want to apply a groove to a clip that already has swing timing or some other sort of timing variation. When you do this, its common to get some very strange, or very exaggerated results. That because the groove engine doesn’t change the clips timing to match the groove – it takes whatever material is already in the clip, and offsets it by the amount specified by the groove.

In other words, a 1/16th note swing groove that looks like this:

…will change the timing of this clip:

…to this:

If that’s not the effect you want, you’ll have to use pre-quantization. Crank Quantize up to 100%:

Now, Live quantizes the clip in real time before applying the groove. With audio clips in particular, you may find that you still get results that require some manual tweaking. In this case, just commit the groove and add or move warp markers as necessary.